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There are 14 corners on the luge track at the Canada Olympic Park in Calgary. Alex Gough’s future was decided on corner 10.

She didn’t know it at the time, but a mistake on that corner, which left her with a broken ankle requiring surgery and months of rehabilitation, was the turning point in her career.

Quit or double down. She had to decide.

“I definitely realize now that was the point where I really committed myself to being as good as I could get,” Gough says, recalling her 2007 injury.

Since then, she has steadily risen through the ranks of this feet-first sliding sport that is so competitive it’s the only one timed to the thousandth of a second. She is the Canadian champion multiple times over. But, far more impressive in a sport completely dominated by German women, is that she routinely knocks one of them off their accustomed perch on the World Cup podium.

“It was exciting,” she says. Then, as if realizing that doesn’t fully convey the import of what happened, she adds “super, super exciting.”

“It was a huge accomplishment for me and Canada and even for women in our sport because it had been so long since anyone but a German woman had won a race.”

Fourteen years to be exact.

Just knowing that it was possible to beat the Germans was a titanic shift in the sport of luge and for Gough in particular. Since then, there has been another win, eight other World Cup medals and two bronze medals in world championships, most recently on home turf in Whistler earlier in February.

But this 25-year-old Calgary native’s success hasn’t come in a smooth line, ticking up at regular intervals or spiking at just the right time. The 2010 Olympics, when performance mattered most, she found she couldn’t deliver.

She was coming off a fourth-place finish in a World Cup race on a track similar to the one in Whistler for the Olympics. In training runs in the days ahead of the Winter Games she was comfortably in third. Gough was confident an Olympic medal was well within her abilities.

Then, tragedy struck. Georgian slider Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a training crash just hours before the opening ceremony. Officials decided to increase safety by slowing down the sliders, who were hitting speeds of 150 km/h. The men’s start was moved down to the women’s start and they in turn were moved down the track to the lower and more awkward junior start — one that Gough had no experience with.

“My shot at doing anything there was done,” she says. The physical change in the track was one factor, but the mental game in being able to overcome a sudden wrench in the works was also an issue.

“I definitely didn’t handle it as well as I could have,” says Gough, who finished 18th. “Vancouver was super disappointing for me.”

But, like the broken ankle, it, too, proved to be a turning point.

“It was part of what drove me through the next summer to really train hard and come back stronger.”

Gough is now considered to be one of the most instinctive sliders on the circuit. She has had to be. That’s because her parents, who had the foresight to put her in luge when she was 13, didn’t give her height or “monkey arms.”

Of all the forms of adversity Gough has had to overcome from broken bones to Olympic disappointment, her body type is perhaps the biggest of all.

The podium pictures tell the tale. The Germans have inches and pounds on Gough. Her official statistics put her at 5-foot-6, though she claims another inch. Regardless, the World Cup points leader, Natalie Geisenberger, is an uncontested six feet tall.

In luge it isn’t the height that matters so much as the long arms that come with it. As with the other sliding sports of bobsled and skeleton, the start makes all the difference. That’s where the speed is generated and where most races are won or lost. As sliders goes down the track the best they can do is not lose speed by hitting a corner or skidding. They must drive the cleanest line possible. That’s where Gough has excelled.

The start has been harder for her. It comes in two parts. First, Gough launches herself forward with a pull from the start handles. Then, with the help of spiked gloves, she paddles the ice for the next few metres to gain more speed. All things being equal, and they usually are at the World Cup level, longer and stronger arms make for faster starts.

Gough can’t make her arms grow longer but, over the years, with hours spent in the gym building strength and even more hours spent paddling around hockey rinks to perfect her technique, she has managed to get her start times to be competitive enough that, if she slides perfectly, she has a chance to win.

But it is never easy or guaranteed. On Saturday, in the final World Cup race of the season in Sochi on what will be the Olympic track a year from now, she was sixth.

“You just train until you can’t think about it anymore and it becomes natural and instinctive,” says Gough. That goes for the start and the entire run. “If I bump early to a curve I don’t need to have that thought process about what to do next, it just sort of happens, and that’s really important because you’re going 140 kilometres an hour.”

She credits much of that to the training led by national team coach Wolfgang Staudinger.

“We have a bit of a disadvantage on the starts,” says Staudinger. “But we’re working on it and perfecting our sliding.”

A former German Olympic slider himself, Staudinger has been Canada’s head coach since 2007. He has been busy doing everything from overhauling the training program and tackling the pervasive belief that German sliders are unbeatable, to becoming a Canadian citizen and learning the national anthem.

“I said to myself the day will come, hopefully sooner than later, when I have to listen to the anthem and I want to know the words.”

Gough delivered that first in 2011 in a World Cup in Paramonovo, Russia. They’re both hoping for a repeat performance, 1,700 kilometres south in Sochi next year.

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